Traveling makes you happy but not everyone in your circles. Not all your friends, work colleagues and even family will be happy because not everyone wants to hear your amazing stories and that’s a fact according to a research report in social interaction entitled The Unforeseen Costs of Extraordinary Experience published by Psychological Science.

Travel envy is real that sometimes it will leave you to think twice if you still want to talk about your trips or not. Social Media have added much to this vicious circle which makes someone envious and feeling hateful of those who have had an extraordinary experience. So as an ordinary traveler, how do you deal with this issue?

These are some helpful guide on how to deal with the struggles and to avoid the stress of travel envy. These will help you travel without making your friends jealous or making yourself envious of others. I do not consider this as humble bragging I mean literally; I just want to travel and see beautiful places, meet amazing people, experience a different culture and go on an adventure. I am not showing off but I want to share my stories too. I am not bragging but I am proud of my experience. So for me, there is no humble bragging here. I regard it as sensitivity and propriety.

10 Ways to Overcome Travel Envy

Do not envy others. I made this as a golden rule in traveling, do not be envious yourself with your friends and colleagues because it will do no good to you. Sometimes you will think it’s unavoidable but it would be wiser if you will make it as motivation to reach your travel goals. Instead of being jealous and all consumed by unhappiness of self-pity, learn something out of someone’s experience and make it better when you do it on your own.

Don’t broadcast your travel plan to the world. Avoid sharing a lot of details about your planned trip but make sure that someone knows about it. It is important that someone close to you has the knowledge where you are going in case something untoward happens. Broadcasting about your trip is not cool at all. It will elicit an awkward atmosphere when you get too excited about your trip and people around you aren’t. Not everyone will understand your feelings.

Avoid too much social media exposure. During your travel, avoid posting selfies and flooding food porn photos in your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram timelines. Your friends, colleagues and family may think you are trying to brag. It will also be a good etiquette to post photos after travelling by using proper captions and hash tags but post only sensible pictures and avoid multiple check-ins every single time. Learn when to properly tell and share your experience to people.

Don’t travel brag. You have all the right to tell the world about your great experience but don’t expect them all to like it. Yes, you are proud of that epic travel escapade of yours and travel bragging is your right but it will alienate other people especially your friends and family and make them resentful towards you. After a trip, just tell them you had a great time and the experience was amazing then proceed with your life. Don’t travel brag or never travel brag at all.

Tell stories about your trip when you are asked to. Don’t avoid conversations leading to your travel as a topic of discussion and be humble to share when they want to listen to your stories. When you avoid conversation about your travel, you might sound arrogant and that you don’t want to share your experience at all. Tell them a story not just about yourself and only when you are asked to.

Learn when to stop talking about your recent trip. As a traveler, you could still feel ecstatic after a great trip but learning to be sensitive about other people will save you from the stress of travel envy. As I’ve said, not everyone wants to hear about your great adventure. Learning when to stop sharing your wonderful travel story is an art to master.

Create a travel journal or online diary. Since not everyone wants to hear your story, write your experience and share them to those who really want to listen. And who would that be? Of course, they are the people who share the same interests with you. Travel enthusiasts, travel bloggers and writers might be more than willing and interested to read your stories. So go on, even if no one reads them.

Don’t make your travel about yourself alone. Have enough of the selfies and self-promotion. Find and share something unique about your travel. Make it something that transcends from usual traveling to exploring culture, history, people, local food and unique adventures.

Don’t force people to travel like you do. They don’t need your unsolicited travel advice first and foremost. Let them discover the passion themselves. Let them figure out what inspires them and choose what makes them happy. Their happiness is not your problem anyway.

You travel for your own happiness. No one is responsible for your happiness except yourself. You travel to explore your curiosities and satisfy your inner wanderlust, not to make your friends envy you. Your real purpose is only known to you and that is all that matter. For whatever reason there is, you don’t need validation from other people.

The struggle of travel envy is indeed real but learning these tips will somehow spare you from the negativities and will keep you from throwing your great travel experience into a dump hole.

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23 Comments

I’ve never understand travel envy, sure I travel a lot (more than most) but I never get jealous when my friends/loved ones travel. I’m happy when people in my circle are also getting the change to go out and explore the world.

I always say, your wall, your rules but it does help to be a bit more watching on what you post. Travel can inspire some yet make other envious. Try to balance things out and also don’t be too focused on pleasing everybody.

I did not know such a thing existed. Maybe because people are not very vocal about how they feel. Your tips are all spot on. I do a lot of traveling, and I maintain a blog where I write about my experiences. If people read it, and comment, I’m grateful. If not, I am still grateful for the opportunity to travel.

I’ll go for number ten. Travel for your own happiness. Sometimes, I see people travelling just because they saw other people going to places and thinking that they are behind and I don’t like that. We should not force ourselves to travel because other people does. We must travel so seek our own happiness.

I try not to post too many photos on social media when I travel because I hate it when someone updates their status every 15 minutes when they are traveling. I do love to see photos of their travels, just not every 15 minutes. 🙂

My younger daughter had the opportunity to travel to Europe last summer. My older daughter wanted to go,but her schedule just would not allow it. She has the worst travel envy to this day. Any time someone brings up Maddie’s travels she just turn so red and says “I should have gone too.”

We don’t post at all about our trips. We don’t even usually end up using our phones. It’s sad because we enjoy posting for our friends and family but other people get involved and it ruins it because they’re so hateful.

These are great tips for dealing with travel envy. I really love the idea of not broadcasting your trip unless someone asked you to explain your travels. These are great tips I will have to share with a friend of mine who loves to brag. Thanks for sharing the tips.

TheBudgetarianTraveler

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